• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 21, 2020

Attempting to find a solution to Google’s cookie shutdown, companies have begun rolling out alternatives to targeting. Infutor on Tuesday introduced a cookieless identity data product aimed at dealing with difficult ad-targeting challenges.

The tool, Total Mobile Ad ID Solution, launched with data exchange BDEX. The company gained early access to provide brands, retailers and agencies with digital identity data through Infutor’s platform. The goal is to combat marketers’ dwindling reliance as browsers like Google Chrome stop supporting third-party cookies.

During the past year, Infutor has been making investments in identity offline as well as digital in general. Specifically, the company has been working on a digital graph with an opt-in privacy compliant system where hashed emails tie to mobile ad IDs, explains Brian Burke, VP of product at Infutor.

“It gives us a strong sense of the device owners that allows us to build a more determinate and accurate view to help customers understand what devices consumers use,” Burke said.

The idea is to get past an environment where advertisers rely on third-party cookies by linking a hashed email to a device ID without disclosing the owner. This is done through a one-way encryption algorithm that does not allow the company to backtrack through the data to determine its origin. Although the brand may only have a fraction of the information, additional data from Infutor ties together the data without disclosing personal information.

BDEX ingests Infutor’s Mobile Ad ID and hashed email database of about 350 million digital devices and 2 billion MAID/hashed email pairs. This includes a Confidence Score on the recency and frequency of pairing, giving marketers the probability of a pair being active.

Ideally, linking anonymous digital identities to first-party CRM data in a privacy-compliant way improves audience segmentation, personalized messaging and digital and programmatic onboarding rates.

Infutor is not the only company that believes it has found the solution. Atlanta-based ad tech company Clickagy, which has technology that can track more than 1.5 billion devices in the U.S. and filter the world’s online behavior in real-time, recently released a tool it calls Privacy Clusters.

Most of the solutions in the cookieless world have one of three major vulnerabilities: scale, fraud, or future-proof. Some email-based solutions check all privacy-compliant boxes, but only achieve between 5% and 10% scale, and zero visibility to fraud introduced by publisher greed, according to the company. There’s no audit trail.

It’s important to remember that cookieless targeting emerged because consumers do not want to be tracked. Rather than trying to hide the tracking device, Privacy Clusters concedes that one-to-one prospecting isn't the future, so it “micro groups” individuals across devices, including Apple’s without needing consent. The company claims its privacy compliant in every country worldwide.

Privacy Clusters act as a cookie replacement, where any existing analytics, attribution, or behavioral data technologies will continue to work, and there is zero reliance on cookies or any form of PII data.